Quiet songs that sound like truth

Donovan Woods is starting to figure this stuff out

Donovan Woods in Toronto, July 20. Photos: Christie Vuong for PW

Two guys from Sarnia meet in Toronto.

“Where did you live?” I asked Donovan Woods.

“Bond Street.”

I was not expecting this answer. “I lived on Hollands Avenue,” I said.

The two streets are a block apart. I’m 14 years older than Woods and I left town young, but we would surely have been neighbours at least briefly.

“No fuckin’ way,” Woods said. “What number?” 

I told him. We grew up in the same block, a block apart. His best friend grew up across the street from me, or at least from my parents after I left for university. “We could see each other’s bedrooms between the houses.”

Each of us asked detail questions to nail the geography down. “So, there was the park, and then there was the first house after the park…” Woods said.

“…We were the second house,” I said.

“That’s fucking wild. That’s like 90 feet from where I grew up.” Woods, a singer-songwriter of considerable repute who now divides his time between Toronto, Nashville and the road, took a moment to consider the surprises life serves up.

“Great toboggan hill back there,” he said at last.

It’s true. My house was on a string of properties that jutted partway into a nice big park that was mostly grassy field, but Parks and Rec put a single low-slung hill there when I was a kid. You could run up the hill, roll down it, or in winter, ride a plastic sleigh down it. This multiplied the neighbourhood’s recreation options.

“My friend once drove his mom’s Dodge Grand Caravan up that hill,” Woods said. All right. Now we were getting somewhere.

“So we had this friend named Greg, who has died since. But he was really into his Jeep, and he would drive up that toboggan hill to prove how awesome his Jeep was. And then my friend Wes was like, ‘My fuckin’ mom’s Grand Caravan could do that.’ And he drove his mom’s minivan up it, with, like, five of us in the back of it. And it locked up at the top, and we started sliding sideways. We were all leaning over to make sure it didn’t roll. It was inches from rolling his Mom’s minivan down the toboggan hill.”

This was an excellent hometown story. I offered another data point. “Do you know that Kim Mitchell song, Patio Lanterns?”

“Yeah.”

“Because apparently he lived near Bond Street, and there was a house on Bond that had patio lanterns.” 

Mind blown, Woods pushed back. “No. Really? I’d heard a story about that, but I didn’t know it was Bond Street.”

To be fair, I have never had any hard evidence about the location of Kim Mitchell’s patio lanterns. “Well, the thing is, any house in Sarnia that had patio lanterns, you would tell yourself, ‘That is Kim Mitchell’s.’” 

“Well, they may well have been,” Woods allowed.

We spent a few more minutes mapping the contours of our now-shared childhood reality. NHL players who once lived nearby. The eternal, pointless and mostly harmless fights between kids at the public elementary school we both attended and kids at the Roman Catholic school next door, which no longer stands, although the end came peacefully.

Eventually I asked about music, and the rest of today’s post will read a bit more like an interview with a singer-songwriter. But here’s the thing about Donovan Woods, whose new album is superb even by his usual standards and whose tour will bring him to 16 Canadian cities and 10 in the United States before Christmas: For a second there, it got pretty scary in Wes’s mom’s minivan on the toboggan hill.

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In eight or nine albums, depending how you count them, and an EP since 2007, Donovan Woods has become a fixture in Canadian music, a singer-songwriter who favours quiet miniatures on simple themes: Life, love, missed opportunities, family. He’s built roomy. He plays the guitar and sings in a small, high-pitched voice with a note of confession. His between-song patter is incongruously hilarious. Every year he ranks the Great Lakes, with never any explanation for changes from year to year. This year was a good year for Lake Huron.

A lot of people haven’t heard of him. Among those who have, some work themselves up to a level of devotion that still surprises him. Sometimes people show him lyrics he wrote that they’ve tattooed on their bodies. I mentioned to another Ottawa-based journalist I was going to Toronto to interview him: she gasped and threw her hands up to her mouth, as though I had announced some important and beautiful news. “I would not be able to keep my shit together,” my colleague said.

When he was a kid in Sarnia, Woods’s sister knew he would never be good at sports, because look at him, so she told him he’d need another skill to meet girls. “Really good advice,” he says now. He took guitar lessons for half a year from Terry Titian, who played and sang in every bar in town and some outside, and who is since deceased.

“I immediately started making up songs. I did it kind of compulsively. I didn’t play them for anybody, but I made up a lot of things.”

At the University of Guelph he started in political science and then switched to English and theatre studies. Maybe he could be an actor. “I guess I just wanted to feel I was special enough to be famous.”

He didn’t play music for people or money until he moved to Toronto. He’d play open mikes and songwriters’ circles at The Central on Markham Street or C’est What down on Front Street. Very close to zero of the people in those venues would have been there to hear Donovan Woods sing.

“When I listen to those songs now, I can hear — you know there’s that David Byrne book where he’s like, the history of music is the history of the places where it was played? I can hear I’m writing songs only to serve that purpose. Only to serve quieting people down in a bar, and proving that I can play the guitar and that I can sing. They all start with a sort of flourish of guitar, and the first verse is a big huge note that’s quite long so I can prove that I can do what I’m doing. They’re not about anything. They’re just a showcase of skills.”

Eventually you move past rhyming exercises and crowd control. “In that period, I would have written the first songs that made some sense. One of those was ‘My Cousin Has a Grey Cup Ring,’ which is about my dad’s cousin.”

“Of all the things I want in life,” the song goes, “Well he's got a car, and a beer, and a wife/ And he's not jealous of the way I sing/ But I'm jealous of that Grey Cup ring.”

“That was kind of the first song I made that had a narrative, that made sense and was linear. I thought, ‘OK, this is good. I can play this for people.’ But it would have been 20 years of writing songs before I had one that I thought was good.”

Today he is a prolific songwriter. He works with a lot of songwriting partners. He writes songs for other singers. I get the impression it’s as much social as business, like grabbing a coffee. Woods wrote “Man-Made Lake” with Ed Robertson from Barenaked Ladies. He edits other people’s songs. From the way he talks, he sounds unsentimental about it and hard to impress.

On the radio, or on streaming or however the universe delivers musical surprises these days, he sometimes recognizes his songwriting partners’ styles. While Christie Vuong was taking photos for this article, Woods barked out a few lines from a Luke Combs tune, “Beer Never Broke My Heart.” A real banger. The way the lyrics define the rhythm — “Lawng — Nehck — Ahce — Cowld — Beer never broke mah Hahhrt” — sounded like his colleague Jonathan Singleton. And indeed Singleton did work on the song.

This business of collaboration is one of a few ways a gap appears between the feelings a song can evoke — an intimacy, a recognition, a moment of truth and honesty — and the fact that the song is a construct. It’s a thing you make that stands in for a feeling. “Man-Made Lake” inserted one of Ed Robertson’s childhood memories inside one of Woods’s childhood locales, so it describes a feeling neither of them actually had growing up.

“You couldn’t fact-check these songs. And the people they’re about, they would not even agree to the characterizations. I’ve had people recognize themselves in songs. They’re always mad.”

But if you do it well — if you learn your technique and you edit yourself and you listen to the sounds in your own head — you can make a thing that sounds like the truth. Even if it gets there by an odd path. “Do you know the Bob Dylan song, “Isis?”

Barely. It’s on Dylan’s 1976 album Desire, the second track, after an opening song called “Hurricane” that is so astonishing I usually just listen to “Hurricane” again.  

Woods reminded me the story of “Isis.” “He gets married to someone and then he has to go rob a grave with a guy. And then somebody dies and then he steals jewels from a pyramid and he goes back…”

He finally abandoned the plot summary. “To get the feeling of what it feels like in a dead-end marriage with somebody who doesn’t love you, you have to tell a story about robbing a pyramid with a guy who dies in a sandstorm. For some reason, exaggerating something is more true than the truth. Because the truth is stunted and boring. Particularly as a man, you’re not able to communicate the sadness or the frustration of the feeling that you’re having.”

It’s true, I said. What usually happens when you’re a man and you’re sad is that, instead of robbing a pyramid, you go home and you eat soup right out of the can.

Woods nodded. “And you sleep on a couch, and you don’t talk to anyone for a long time. You can write about that, but — and I don’t even write much of the stuff that’s tremendously exaggerated. But something has to be happening in a song.”

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I asked: For a guy who wrote hundreds of songs before he performed one, and who enjoys very little about the trappings of the music business, is performing the point? Or is performing just this thing you have to do so you’ll be allowed to write more songs?

“It’s a little bit of both. It’s so true: you don’t know about a song — and often you don’t even know what it’s about or what it does — until you do it in front of people. Talking about this contains artists’ language that I always hate to use, but there’s an exchange of energy between people. Some songs hold. Others just sort of float off, and you know it immediately. Then you can say, ‘Well, I didn’t play it well enough,’ and you can try again. And you may be right. But more than likely, if something floats off, it’s [because it’s] not quite good enough.” 

So audiences are like a test medium, the agar in a petri dish that helps you determine whether you’ve written something that will thrive? Indeed, he said. He’s scheduled some Ontario shows next year for the sole purpose of audience-testing new songs to see if they work right.

“I feel lucky every time a new one is good. It’s so hard to write a good song. Like, an unassailable song? I think I’ve probably done it four times. I might have four songs that no one in the world could say shit about. You could say you don’t like it, but you can’t say it’s not good.”

Which songs?

“I think ‘Portland, Maine’ is pretty much unassailable. I think that song ‘Next Year’ — you could say that’s not your thing, but it does the exact thing it’s supposed to do. And I think ‘Back for the Funeral’ is probably one.”

Here are those three songs in order. “Back for the Funeral” is on the new album, and we’ll talk some more about it.

“Your hometown’s just the first place you don’t understand/ And your family’s just strangers you know like the back of your hand.” That’s a good lyric.

I’ve been trying to meet Woods since 2022, when I started listening closely to his albums and I thought the Sarnia thing would be a good hook for a story. We were going to meet in May 2022 in Ottawa, but I had to cancel. I had to go home for a funeral in Sarnia. My mom’s.

Parallel lives, once again. “Sorry to hear about the funeral,” Woods messaged me at the time. “I was just in Sarnia a couple weeks back for a double funeral Saturday: 11am and then 1pm.”

One of those funerals became the basis for the song “Back for the Funeral.” Greg, the guy who used to drive his Jeep up the toboggan hill, died, and it wasn’t clear whether he meant to. “There was no clarity.”

“The sick part” of double-funeral day in Sarnia, Woods says after a brief pause, “is that it was really fun. We all got to see each other. We got to go to two events. We all went out afterward. And then we all got COVID.”

“Back for the Funeral” pops out from the other tracks on Things Were Never Good If They’re Not Good Now, Woods’s latest album. He’s been talking about the album on his social-media channels as a bit of a breakthrough. The reviews have suggested similar things. “A masterclass in vulnerable storytelling,” one said. The cover illustration is a photo of Woods bringing the cake out for his wife’s 40th birthday.

He buys the notion that this album is different from the ones before it. “The last couple, whether consciously or not, I was trying to become successful. And on this one I’m not. I’ve stopped.”

What led him to concentrate on the material instead of on the effect it would have?

“I just had a hard couple of years.”

His main songwriting collaborator, Abe Stoklasa, died, in a way that permitted multiple interpretations, like Greg the Jeep guy from home. “At the time he died I hadn’t spoken to him in a number of months because he was upset at me.

“And apart from that, I just had a big reckoning. It occurred to me that I was not doing life correctly.” He’d gone through a divorce, snowballing musical success, a new relationship, remarriage. About the bad stuff that preceded the good stuff, he said, “I don’t think I ever grieved or… just did that properly. What I ended up with was a public-facing person — and then who I really was. I was just not living values.”

As he was sorting through all of this, Stoklasa died, last November. “And I just thought, ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’ I started to do a lot of therapy. I just felt so unwell.”

If you’re lucky, talking to a therapist gives you some ability to observe your own reactions with some objectivity, as well as some tools for talking about what’s going on inside. “Men need therapy so intensely. I wish they weren’t resistant to it. We’re not great at things! Even just articulating pain, like saying, ‘I am sad that my friend died.’”

The album title came up while Woods was spending time with a friend who was also in therapy. Practice calling your feelings by their names, good and bad, they’d both been told. “One time he was like, ‘Things were never good if they’re not good now.’” That went straight onto the next album cover, precisely because it’s a jarring sentiment in a world where everything feels like it’s coming apart.

Was it weird to be working through all of this internal stuff while he was touring and performing? Sure, but it also reminded him of the importance of making the effort. Because anyone who lives in the public eye has to be careful not to mistake the more dramatic moments for any healthy version of real life.

“It’s a really nice feeling to come out on a stage and have people react the way your colleague did, to have people gasp upon the sight of you,” Woods said. “I mean, it doesn’t get much more affirming than that. But I think it knocks your homeostasis out of whack, to a certain degree.

“That level of kindness, when it’s given to you — I mean, most people don’t usually receive a roomful of people applauding them. Maybe at your wedding? And then maybe never again? So to even receive that is pretty weird. So to have it as your baseline for being appreciated, and then you go home and you’re just irritating to your spouse — you’re out of whack, a little bit.”

The solution, or the elements of a resolution, lies in learning to live your life instead of hiding from it, or wishing for another life. At a certain point in your life, that kind of serenity comes a little more easily.

“I’ve crested the hill of going-concern-ness. My ceiling is visible. Everyone can see what it is. It’s this. It’s this. The rooms are big enough. Nothing much beats a room for 700 people with 700 people in it. The returns are diminishing after that.”

Donovan Woods performs Thursday at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington, ON. A fall tour, with stops from Cape Breton to Victoria to Nashville, will follow. Details of the tour are here.